


Bonfire

by ArdeaWrites



Series: Resonant Crowbar [6]
Category: Half-Life
Genre: Bonfires, Cultural Celebrations, Freeman gets out of the lab and has a nice evening with his friends, Gen, New Year, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, White Forest, and maybe has a Feel, emotional support D0G, post-apocalyptic dance parties, post-strider battle pre-Borealis trip, very old questionable instant coffee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:07:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27368542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWrites
Summary: White Forest does its best to celebrate the first human holiday on the calendar after the rocket launch. While he'd much rather keep working, Freeman eventually makes it outside the lab to see what all the nonsense is about and decides maybe that was a good decision after all.
Relationships: Gordon Freeman & Alyx Vance, Gordon Freeman & Barney Calhoun, Gordon Freeman & Eli Vance
Series: Resonant Crowbar [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1855192
Comments: 8
Kudos: 53





	Bonfire

  
  


He’d said he didn’t want to come.

Sure to be loud noises. People shooting guns in the air. That sort of thing. People too close, wanting to talk to him and have him talk back to them. 

It’d been a long few days and the work wasn’t done yet. They would be leaving tomorrow, and whatever he didn’t finish tonight he’d have to trust to someone else. 

“Work will never be done, come take a break at least!” Alyx had said, but when he’d frowned at her she’d made a face of resignation and disappeared. 

Barney had been harder to dislodge. He’d come around three times, each trip with another description of food the kitchen was making or ‘entertainment’ some other entrepreneurial rebel had concocted. 

Fireworks in a rocket launcher was the latest of these, and after that Freeman had flatly refused. 

Loud noises made his head hurt. Too many hard knocks, too much gunfire without ear protection, and a lot of explosions in close proximity. His hearing was still mostly whole but if he could avoid an explosion via foreknowledge, for once in recent life, then he would. 

The lab notebook’s fine lines seemed to blur in his vision. Words, write darn it, he had work to do. 

Someone hollered outside. Someone started singing. 

_Calculations (see proof on previous page) suggest if we reduce piston diameter by 2.7% we can achieve an increase fuel combustion efficiency of 5.9%. With our current fuel reserves estimate this will take us through to-_

-BANG. 

Blue and red lights flashed across the laboratory windows. His first thought was Combine attack but then, oh yes, the rocket launcher fireworks. Of course. 

The lights played across the makeshift worktables and salvaged glassware, stacks of books and notebooks, blackboards dingy with half-erased chalk and windows streaked with inked equations. Strange shadows danced through the darkened lab, phantoms of the academics who had come before. Twenty years of human intelligence bent towards closing the gate between worlds. How many had been alive to see it? 

He got off the ground and found his pen and flipped through the notebook to find his place again. The page was crumpled where he’d gripped it. He smoothed it out, pressed the creases flat, and poised his pen to continue the thought. Fuel reserves. A more efficient engine. Not his area of expertise, but one did what one could. 

Why? 

_I want to live._

And he had, but now living meant getting places, reconnecting distribution lines, finding and networking with other human and Vortigaunt enclaves. Shifting productivity from firearms to fuel and foodstuff. The Combine’s mass manufacturing plants would lie dead and stripped within weeks, and humanity had to be ready to reestablish their own resource production to fill that void, or the men and women who had survived the Combine’s initial overthrow would die of starvation before they killed off the last lingering phantoms of their conquerors. 

_-through to next spring with an allocation of 4.9 liters per-_

Another boom rattled the glassware. He picked up the pen again, looked at his line of blue ink dashed off the page, and put it down in defeat. 

There would be no peace in White Forest tonight. 

  


  


People were drifting in knots and twos and threes down to the big open patch of scrub grass and broken asphalt in front of White Mesa’s main gate. Burnt striations still marred the space, reminders of the strider battle on launch day. But the gate was closed, the sky calm, and after two weeks of minimal Combine remnant activity, beyond the odd strays, White Forest life had settled into an almost-routine semblance of civilization. 

And so someone had concocted the present scheme: a bonfire, some scraped-together celebratory trappings, and a bunch of explosive-but-ineffective home-made mortar shells. They’d had a few years to practice with explosives and had successfully reinvented colorful fire for the purpose of entertainment. A waste, a distraction, and downright dangerous, but humans liked those things. Other humans. Not him. 

He found D0G and whistled for it to come to the vantage point he’d scouted. On the outer side of the bonfire, well back in the shadows, the cement wall of the old carport not too far behind him. D0G obliged, making happy noises as Freeman patted his shoulder, and set up in a stiff-legged guard position. Freeman sat between his forepaws, heavy old Russian military surplus coat wrapped tight against the damp February chill. 

It was apparently ‘year of the horse,’ whatever that meant. A new year celebrated a month-and-change after the calendar rolled over. Twenty-twenty-six, if human reckoning hadn’t gotten off-track somewhere. Someone had painted a giant horse on the side of the silo, just a few lines in bright white paint, with an orange lambda on its rump. A bonfire was heaped before it. A hand-crank record player with a folk record of questionable age was scratching along, balanced on a milk crate. Simple enduring technology, typical of the region. 

D0G’s limbs and armor plating were cold but its central chassis hummed with energy and putted out a steady pleasant warmth on his back. Freeman guessed it was recording the night’s festivities. It lowered its head until its flaps were resting gently on the top of his hat. Not uncomfortably. He reached up and patted the plates, mindful not to touch its eye, and D0G rewarded him with a rumbling purr and an increase in heat output. 

Someone was stringing taped-together cords from White Forest’s generator out to the fire. Someone else had a pilfered Combine-standard radio mic, and suddenly the folk music was coming over White Forest’s emergency broadcast system. 

If there was _any_ remnant Combine activity on the mountain they’d know in a matter of minutes. He wiped his forehead and mentally measured the distance to his weapons locker. _Six minutes, at least. If no one panics and blocks the door._

_This was a bad idea._

But D0G was warm and purring and if he got up now he’d have to go back around the fire to get inside. Someone would recognize him and say something. 

People were still streaming out of White Forest. Refugees wrapped in warm clothing, injured rebels on canes or in wheelchairs pushed by friends, maintenance and mechanics and members of the varying science teams. The scattering of well-armed soldiers circled in the outermost perimeter, just watching. 

No one had asked him to play guard, and for that he was glad. 

Fireworks, armor, him with a pulse rifle, a crowd… He suppressed a shiver. Wise decision on someone’s part. 

Alyx was out in that crowd, circling the fire pit with increasing abandon. She’d clamped down hard on her end of the entanglement but plenty of data was leaking through. She liked the music. She liked the growing press of people. The boom of the homemade fireworks sent a thrill through her that was both fear and wonder. She _liked_ the adrenaline spike and the racing heartbeat, and watching the glowing embers fall. She wrestled a rocket launcher away from another man and shot a rocket up, and cheered when it exploded in a ball of dizzying orange and blue. 

The noise wasn’t so bad when he could see it coming, track the rocket’s rise, anticipate the boom. And the wads of cotton he had stuffed in his ears helped too. 

“Here,” Eli’s voice from the shadows beyond D0G, yelling over the music. He handed Freeman a chipped ceramic mug of dark liquid. “Scouts found some in a military bunker north a ways. Old Russian place. They found molasses too.” 

Freeman sniffed the liquid. The coffee was thick and black as the forest behind him, bitter and burnt and tasting faintly of dust, but the smell filled him. Cheap instant coffee in the university lounge, in the laboratory breakroom, in the tiny cold one-room apartment, in the shared Black Mesa dormitories. An ever-present scent. He preferred his coffee fresh, when he could afford it or find it, roasted and ground and drawn to order, but the bottom-barrel instant powder had been a lifelong constant. 

It tied him down now, demanding his conscious presence. The heat felt good on his hands. He burned his mouth on the first sip and winced at the flavor. He'd thought years until he smelled it again, if ever. 

_“Thank you,”_ he signed. 

Eli made a humming noise. “Don’t drink it too fast. There’s more where that came from but it might have to last us a while.” He vanished into the external ring of observers and Freeman watched him offer a cup to Magnussen, who made a great show of refusing. Eli offered again. Magnussen refused again, but less firmly, and he was side-eyeing the cup. Eli made a “well if you don’t want it” gesture and pretended to take a sip. 

Suddenly Magnussen was very interested. 

Eli handed him the cup with a laugh and a slap on the back. Magnussen’s bushy brows lowered in annoyance but he kept the coffee mug in both hands, as if expecting someone else to try and take it from him. 

_Not my world,_ Freeman thought, until suddenly it was. _Not my people. Not my fight._ But half his mind was still on the fuel equations, ways to make essential transportation possible on what fuel stockpiles they had left. And tomorrow they'd load up the helicopter and burn more precious fuel chasing the ghost of the Borealis into the arctic night. Doctors Vance, Magnussen and Kleiner couldn’t stand the physical demands of the journey plus its near-guaranteed Combine conflict. Doctor Mossman had been their best hope, until her last message and disappearance. Sure they could send the younger generation of rebels north, but they wouldn’t understand what they found and would be at the mercy of whatever Aperture had left strewn about. Alyx and Gordon were the happy medium: enough education to understand the technology, hopefully, and enough firepower to kill anything that interfered. 

He didn't like being cold. He didn't like the idea of confronting unknown Combine remnants while trying to decipher lost human technology on par with anything Black Mesa had developed, and risking life and limb on the off-chance it was somehow relevant to their efforts or necessary to destroy. He really didn't like going in without a clear picture of what had gone wrong. Or knowing how Mossman's disappearance played into it. Getting on that helicopter tomorrow was by far the last thing he wanted to do, but he was going to do it. 

The dance continued. Music changed, grew faster. The Vorts watched, eyes red in the dusk. Were they amused? Confused? Did their species have any equivalent displays of what-of joy? 

Joy. Freedom. Hope. Made more genuine by simplicity and abandon. That's what he was seeing, he realized. He sipped the coffee and pushed down his disdain. How different a species he had become, to not recognize his own kind's primal language. 

When Freeman was happy- _how long had it been, had it ever been, certainly not like this-_ he didn't move. He watched the people dance and felt exhilaration radiating from Alyx, and the more frenzied they grew the more still he became, drawing closer and closer to an emotional absolute zero. Control. This was not permitted influence over him. 

There were lyrics in the music. He didn’t recognize the language. They flowed like water through the rhythm, the voice as much an instrument as information. Singers long dead, their story stamped in polymer, a solid-state record of resonance. 

"You should get out there, let some of that weight off." Eli was back. He eased himself down beside Freeman, one hand on Freeman's shoulder for stability, his good knee up and his prosthetic leg outstretched. D0G slid his forepaws apart to accommodate him. "I know you won't. But you should. It'd be good for you." He released Freeman's shoulder and sipped his own coffee. "This is what you brought us." He gestured to the bonfire. "You should be proud of it." 

_"Not just me,"_ he signed. _"The rocket helped."_

Eli laughed and clapped his shoulder again. The touch was less unwelcome than it might have been. "You know, when I read your application, I thought this kid’s going to be brilliant or a horror. And you came in already a man, looking down your nose at the whole world, and I thought, Horror. And then you went to work and built our crystal imaging station out of scrap parts and batteries and duct-tape, and ran the conduits yourself through the ducts when we couldn’t get the wiring rated correctly. And I thought, ok, he’s brilliant. And _then_ you sent that poor girl, Francine? The one with the hair. You sent her running in tears on her second day because you’d looked at her funny. That over-the-glasses-under-the-eyebrows look. The one you’re giving me right now. Yes. I see that and no I’m not going to shut up.” 

“No, please do not shut up.” Barney slid into the narrow gap on his other side and ended up wedged between Freeman and D0G’s arm. His hands were full of something that smelled like corn and burnt sugar. “You got anything sharp I need to know about?” he asked. 

Freeman shook his head and thought, _this is the part where people roll their eyes._ Though it was a valid question. He was regretting the decision to come unarmed, but he was now thoroughly boxed-in and Calhoun’s bulky jacket was a welcome shield from the breeze on that side. 

“So I thought, ok, he can scare the daylights out of interns. Probably better than having them all swarming over him. And that’s how it went. You’d do something brilliant, and then you’d do something awful, and you never apologized for anything, and I could not decide just what kind of man you were.” He sipped his coffee and Freeman debated making a break for it back to the lab. 

“But you know, I was awful proud of you. You never let the Black Mesa hierarchy eat you down. They gave you a closet and you negotiated for a full laboratory. They gave you no budget and you gave them a marketable prototype. I wonder if all that business with the cascade hadn’t happened, if we all wouldn’t have been working for you by now. If you wouldn’t have been able to wrangle the whole place into a single purpose. I know, I know you never wanted leadership. But folks with drive and focus tend to end up steering the bus. Leave the political nonsense to the Board and just direct the actual on-the-ground research. Make something good out of that bag of cats.” 

Barney made a choking sound. He disengaged his jaw from the half-burnt ball of popcorn long enough to ask “So do you count yourself in that bag? Because I know Magnussen’s got claws but Isaiah can’t use a fly swatter.” 

Freeman looked around for Kleiner; he was on the far side of the ring, making a rhythmic bobbing motion that might have been to the beat of some music somewhere, but it certainly wasn’t the music playing now. 

Eli laughed. “You’re not counting the better half of my team. Azian had the claws. I let her battle the Board and then we decided our team’s direction together. She’s the reason everyone entering the chamber had to be wearing an HEV, by the way, and then Gordon is the reason why the HEV actually worked.” 

Freeman swallowed too much coffee and let the burn in his throat distract from the sudden onslaught of memory. He’d known Azian, in passing. He’d ignored her. She was just another background face, only tangentially related to his work. He had not known she was behind the mandate that a full HEV be worn into the test chamber. The Board had thrown a fit when that rule was passed along, but- _safety first._ It severely limited the number of personnel who could be present for a test, and thus the volume of research acquired from any given trial, but it had saved his life. 

Whether or not he’d gone on to save anyone else, as a result, was a matter of dark-night silent internal debate. From the sound of the seven-hour war he’d just delayed the inevitable by a matter of comparative minutes. He stared into the coffee and felt Alyx’s happy tug on the line, as if reminding him he wasn’t permitted to brood. 

_“I never wanted leadership,”_ he signed. He set the coffee cup between his knees but the ground was uneven and it nearly tipped over. 

Barney rescued it and took a sip, one eyebrow raised as if daring him to protest. 

_Fine._ He waved off the theft. _“But.”_ He let the motion linger. But what. He hadn’t wanted leadership, outside his own little fiefdom of the resonance lab. But he hadn’t wanted anyone else’s leadership anywhere. _“But if it would have stopped the Cascade…”_

Eli grabbed the back of his neck. “You stop that.” 

He tensed, shuddered and made himself hold still. Eli was fragile. He absolutely could not hurt Eli. Any movement, anything, a twitch- _no sharp objects._ His hands were empty. Good. They were balled into fists, clenching the coarse fabric of his military surplus trousers. 

_BOOM._

Another rocket exploded overhead. Green sparks rained down and the air smelled strongly metallic. 

Eli didn’t remove his hand. “You don’t get to talk that way, Gordon. Twenty years I’ve spent second-guessing every decision I made that day. And mourning the woman those decisions cost me. There is no going back. Not in body, and not in mind. You get that through your skull right now, you’ll save yourself and all the rest of us a lot of pain. I’m not sitting here rattling on about Black Mesa because of the cascade, anyway.” He moved his hand, slapped Freeman’s back between his shoulders. “It’s because we want you to take over White Forest.” 

_“What.”_

“You heard me. Settle the Borealis, find Judith, and come back and run this place. Make what we couldn’t make of Black Mesa. World’s had enough of expensive ways to kill people. Finish your fuels research. Get the Vorts involved as partners. See Kleiner’s teleportation work get done. Go back to your energy-transfer prototypes. It’ll be generations before the world’s back to where it was, but that doesn’t mean _this_ generation,” he waved at the frenzied crowd, “needs to live in fear of the dark.” 

This generation was at present stomping in a circle to the music’s beat. He picked out Alyx, her head thrown back, teeth white in the firelight. The horse arched over her. She was flooding their link with contented kinetic joy, _This is good, This is good._

He felt like a stone on the end of a kite string. 

Eli was waiting. Patient like that, patient for twenty years. So Freeman fished the pocket notebook out and the old half-dry ballpoint. His hands were too cold for signs, he told himself. 

White Forest. 

Remote and well-equipped for its location, a technological oasis in a crumbling world. Here was power, supplied by the base's nuclear plant. Purified water. Fortification. 

But the technology in its laboratories was decades behind Black Mesa. Even with enhancements and patchwork by human and Vortigaunt researchers, it still lagged so far behind what he'd worked with before. 

He spiraled the dry pen until ink came, following the indented pattern with his eye. A little empty labyrinth. 

_"Too much is lost."_ He thought of his lab in Black Mesa, the smell of its death. Circuit-board smoke and charred silicone. _"Not the right equipment, no time to build. Nothing to build from. We don't have a food supply with the Combine factories down. How can I continue the research?"_

Eli was reading over his arm as he wrote. "We have food, Gordon. Stockpiles in vaults all over Baikal and Siberia and supply lines all the way to the Chukchi. Trust us. We've been building towards this for a while now. There’s a couple billion people left in the world and there’s going to be more real fast. Food might be a problem if the population grows too quickly, but Combine proteins have a long a shelf life. Maybe too long if you ask me, but then…” He stared at his own coffee cup, drank to the dredges. “We don’t exactly have room to talk." 

Freeman tapped the pen, a line of little blue dots. Thinking. He wanted nothing more than to bury himself in research and in numerical equivalents to reality. A rocket exploded in orange and yellow fire, and the last dot became a harsh jagged line. But the war wasn't over yet. 

Why not? 

_Their_ war was over. 

His war was not over. 

Why not? 

The pen dug into paper, punching through. Eli's eyes on him, patient as always. Barney drinking his coffee and pretending not to watch. 

Use words, write it down. Laboratory notebook; no bad data, no lies. _"The man from Black Mesa can't be stopped. I can't lead."_ I can't invest in what I can't finish. _"He isn't done yet."_ I have no control. _"Risk is too high."_ I can't lose my world again. _"I'm sorry."_

__

__

Eli bumped him with his shoulder. “Words I never expected to hear from you, Gordon. And you know what, I don’t want to hear them now. Black Mesa's ghosts won't be around forever. The Vortigaunts say they've had some success in that area. Let’s take the world a day at a time. Finish the Borealis, then we’ll talk again. It may be there's a solution up there. If the Combine wanted it that badly maybe it has something to do with our third party." 

Freeman extracted his coffee from Barney’s grip and took another drink. It tasted faintly of molasses and had chilled. He handed it to D0G, who set it inside the front chassis compartment for a moment, then handed it back, warm again. He considered Eli's words. Finish the job in front of him. He was good at that. If the thing in the suit would permit it. 

Barney whistled. “How’d you teach it that trick?” 

_“I asked nicely,”_ he replied. 

“Who, D0G or Alyx?” 

He took a drink to hide the twitch of his mouth. There were perks to having a roboticist for a coworker. And a robot for a coworker. Maybe Alyx could help him rebuild the equipment he’d need to develop a synthetic equivalent to the Xen crystals. Maybe the Vorts would be interested in a resonant energy network that could span a planet with a physical, accessible form of their Vortessence. He’d been pursuing energy transfer, but as the old black record spun and sang, he started considering energy storage too. Data storage. 

Humanity had lost too much too quickly. They needed a better form of library than delicate silicone hard drives code-locked to lost operating systems and ever-decaying paper. They needed something that could be accessed by anyone, at any level of technology. Portable by hand, readable by torchlight. 

Something to raise them up from- 

_-No._ The resonance thrummed with certainty. Alyx paused her dance, caught his gaze and glared at him. _No._

He caught himself, her rebuke a sting but a deserved one. They’d just gotten their planet back; technological development wasn’t going to divide them from it again, no matter how much he didn’t personally like dust in his teeth or the sound of unfamiliar folk music or his own body’s desire to submit to its beat. _Folks with drive and focus tend to end up steering the bus._ He’d better make sure he wasn’t sole owner of that seat, or he’d end up driving White Forest in a straight line towards his own isolationist notion of synthetic comfort and safety. 

They hadn’t saved Earth and all its masses just to become the next Combine, pursuing sameness, shelter and security at the cost of all that life was worth. 

And if all they’d saved was this, a throng of primitive humanity stamping a ring around a fire pit, before a painted horse? Then it had been worth the doing. The baseline held; humanity was, at its first and finest, those who made songs and dances and painted walls. If they stayed right here, dancing by firelight under the white horse, they were worth his lost twenty years and all the blood he’d shed. He told himself that, as he watched the dance. And told himself maybe someday he’d believe it too, not just in theory but as law. 

Humanity made art, solved problems, saved each other and sated hunger and thirst. Cloak it in cities and armor, trade its spears for guns, give it a thousand languages and scatter it across the planet, or the universe, and it would still be at heart the people who cut a chalk horse into a green hillside, painted a horse on a cavern wall, danced around fire and sang. 

For once he wished his senses were less keen, because primitive humanity was at that moment multiplying itself in the bushes off to their left. 

Land would heal. Nature would fill her gaps, slowly and then with vigor, space for speciation over the coming millions of years. He cast his mind out, rolling over all he knew of Earth. This, their entire struggle from the Cascade onward to the Combine’s first great defeat, was a blink in the planet’s history. Physics had dictated the planet’s formation, drawn their substrate out from celestial dust, guided by whatever guided stars, placed precisely around the sun and set to spin in an orbit optimal for humans; a rotation those humans would then name after various animals and mark with odd little celebrations, as if thanking the planet for continuing to do its job. 

They would fight on, continue beating the Combine back until the last thing hostile to their species had been cast into the fire. And humanity would sing and dance across their own planet, free again, at least until it manufactured its own divisions and ideals and wars. 

And then there would be peace after war and celebrations of peace. 

Such was their way. 

The great horse flickered and leapt above them, a thing of myth on the silo wall, kin to the ancient works. 

_I want to live._

Why? 

_Because I don’t trust anyone else to do the job correctly._ To feel the taunt joy in Alyx’s dance, sense the intelligence she’d crafted in the iron beast behind him, the assurance of the men beside him. He’d just found it. He would not entrust it to someone else. 

  


The fire shrank to hot coals. The dancers gave in and threw themselves in heaps on the ground, laughing and panting. Someone changed the records; different music, still unfamiliar, but less demanding of movement. Someone else handed around the leftovers of the kitchen’s caramel popcorn experiment, to mixed reactions. Six Vortigaunts joined hands, said something about enduring friendship expressed via quaint cultural tableau. Two rebels launched into a long discussion with them about how the Chinese New Year was supposed to be celebrated and would be again, when they could prepare properly, and what the significance of the horse was. 

An old woman swayed along around the fire, her face wet with tears, her motions controlled and fluid, steps flawless. This was her music, something from a more peaceful treasured past. 

And then Alyx sprawled across in front of them, over her father’s leg and Freeman’s knees, and stole the coffee cup. D0G heated it again for her and she downed the last swallow. 

_“I was saving that,”_ Freeman signed. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I blame Rosemary Sutcliff. Everything's better with dancing and bonfires. 
> 
> Tried to come up with the happiest ending for Crowbar!Freeman. Like where would I want this character in this continuity at his healthiest and most stable, and this is where I got. I sincerely apologize for depicting a very strange version of Chinese New Year, but am hypothesizing the first new year's celebration after the rocket launch would be a bit of a show and a hodge-podge of whatever the international refugees could come up with on the fly.
> 
> The Uyghur folk dance music Alyx is out there free-styling to--> https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=G1QXMakK03Q


End file.
